Cities in Dust
by LolaBleu
Summary: Because sometimes you don't need fiction to experience a dystopia. *Modern Everlark AU*


**A/N: So I've been reading a lot about Detroit lately, and I though "hey, that's a lot like living in the dystopia's so popular in YA lately," and thus this fic was born. I don't know when I'll be able to update it since I've got two Divergent WIP's, but it's kind of a labor of love, so hopefully not months from now. Also, it will definitely be "M" in upcoming chapters. **

* * *

Peeta sits on the fourth floor balcony of his shitty studio apartment, drinking a beer and looking out over the mouldering remains of Detroit. He moved here fresh out of college with big, vague, naive ideas about _making a difference_ with his art. It was great in theory. But he doesn't think he's making much of a difference with his nine-to-five slathering houses in weather-resistant neutrals that don't ruffle anyone's feathers. He's grossly overqualified for the position, but it's the best he could do with his art degree, and it's steady work that pays nine bucks an hour, so.

As his father reminds him every time Peeta talks to him, he can always come home; work at the bakery during the day, paint in the evenings, "just until you can make ends meet with your art." That's not going to happen. He likes baking, loves his father, but can do without the volley of _stupid lazy useless_ his mother would surely fire at him the moment he stepped through the door, and every hour on the hour thereafter. That is more or less why he came here, to this bombed-out, wreck of a city; it, like him, is in desperate need of a second chance or a fresh start or some other cliche.

Of course Downtown, where it's white and gentrified, still looks okay; a little hangdog and a little empty now that most of the corporate headquarters have left, but still intact. But the neighborhoods surrounding it? Destruction. A five minutes bike ride and you're cruising through neighborhoods that look like nightly news footage of war torn, third world countries instead of the Paris of the Midwest, as Detroit used to be known.

That's where Peeta wants to be. In some outlying neighborhood where the odds aren't going to be in his favor by being male, white, and privileged. He wants to take something no one else wants and turn it into a home. Enough of this safe and normal and known. And in a city with over sixty-thousand abandoned houses surely he can find that. He's seen the listings in the paper, homes for sale for less than he could buy a twenty year old used car for. It'll be a dump, but he'll build it into something special, prove that this city, like him, is worth something.

* * *

It's known as Panem. A nickname given this part of the city due to the eastern european immigrants who settled its proclivity for planting grain in the vacant lots to augment their backyard gardens. In the 30's and 40's the wheat gave way to homes for factory workers. In the 1960's White Flight started the migration out of the city that the loss of manufacturing jobs in the 70's and 80's finished.

Most of the homes have been abandoned for decades, and long since burned down and plowed under by the city like the dirty little secret of it's decline. Much of the land has been reclaimed by a sprawling urban prairie, but some houses remain as crumbling idols to the boom-and-bust capitalism of the twentieth century, awaiting the same fate. There are some holdouts though, stalwart outcasts who either can't or won't leave their homes, which now float in a sea of hip-high grass like ghost ships.

There are other parts of the city Peeta could look for a house in, where for a few thousand dollars he could get some perky little bungalow that fell into foreclosure. But he doesn't want to profit off of someone else's misery, can't look at those homes without thinking about the day the bank and sheriff evicted the last family so someone could make a profit again. So he keeps coming back to Panem, riding his bike through the streets he's learning as well as the lines on his palm; fate and life, head and heart drawn out in asphalt.

He's been told the east side of Detroit is unsafe, that it's "war-like"; that there are vicious animals and vicious humans who see him as nothing but a target. And maybe that's true of other neighborhoods on the east side, but in Panem it seems like most people just want to live their lives and be left alone. Sure, it's a rough place, but it has to be, abandoned as it was when the city decided to pull out and cut their losses.

And on the first day that feels like spring after a long, cold winter, and a morning of riding his bike through the burned out shells of factories and slaughterhouses, Peeta finally finds what he didn't know he was looking for: a four-square craftsman house, right on the fringe of the tiny neighborhood of six houses on Seam Lane.

Peeta drops his bike amid the overgrown weeds and car parts choking the front yard in a daze. The trash is piled up so high on the inside it's spilling out the missing windows like a tidal wave, the roof sagging in so many places the eaves look like the crenulated maw of some unknown beast. He leans in through the gaping hole where there should be a front door, but he can't see anything other than more trash and ragged wall-paper.

He fights his way through the weeds to the back of the house, but it's even worse than the front, and the best Peeta can do is lift himself up to peek in the window frames. He finds the kitchen, he thinks. It's wide and spacious as a living room, and it makes the certainty he's feeling solidify. This is his home, and it's not even a decision, it's something that resonates deep in his bones, a certain knowledge that this is where he belongs, where he's always belonged.

* * *

A week later, with five hundred dollars in hand, Peeta is the winning bidder for 74 Seam Lane. It feels fortuitous; that he found the house when he did, that he had the money to buy it, that there was an auction at all.

* * *

The first thing Peeta does is pile up all the junk in the front yard to one side and take a weed-whacker to the overgrown vegetation. It makes room for the two trailer sized dumpsters that the only trash company that still services the area deposits on the lawn. They cost more than the house did.

All the activity is enough to draw the neighbors attention. He finds himself waving to a knot of small, dark-skinned children that live in the house directly across the street from him. The oldest is a girl of about twelve, and she darts off, down to the towards the three remaining houses at the other end of the block, two on his side of the street and one on the other.

He's just finished throwing a set of tread-less, shredded tires into one of the bins when a young woman arrives. She's about his age, slender but with shapely legs and slim hips and thick black braid that hangs over her shoulder and across the swell of her breasts.

"Hi," he greets her, his tongue thick in his mouth because he's suddenly and inexplicably caught up in the snare of her piercing grey eyes. He feels like he's thirteen again, all hot and nervous and fidgety asking Clove Summers to the junior high dance. "I'm Peeta," he says extending his hand towards her.

"Katniss," she answers simply, shaking it. Her hand is small in his, but strong and warm and calloused. "You bought this place?"

"Yeah."

"Why?" she asks suspiciously, eyes narrowed.

"To live in?" he says uncertainly. "Why else would I buy it?"

She stares at him, lips pursed like she's sizing him up, looking for any tell that would give away a lie. "It's a lot of work," she frowns, looking up at the house critically. She walks across the lawn slowly, taking it all in and he follows along without thinking. "You could just tear it down, you know," she offers, and he can't help thinking the question is a test.

"No, I couldn't," he says after a minute's consideration, shaking his head. "Just because something's damaged doesn't mean it's worthless."

He sees Katniss' eyebrows lift up in curiosity out of his peripheral vision. "Well," she says, clearing her throat. "Um, good luck."

"Thanks."

He stares up at it as she walks away, thinking about what it will look like a year from now, five years from now, with little blonde-haired babies running around. That's what he wants it to be. A home, for him, for the family he'll have someday. He wants to grow old here. He doesn't want to tear it down.

"Peeta," Katniss calls out and he turns to find her walking backwards up the sidewalk, staring at the house with him. "It's a nice house," she smiles.

xxxx

He spends the rest of the day literally shoveling out the trash on the first floor, and barely making a dent in it. And it seems like every shovel full reveals some new horror.

There are holes in the wall where someone smashed them in to strip out the valuable electrical wiring, and where they're not gaping they're water damaged and moldy, just like the carpet he'll have to tear out. The piping - where it's not burst from freezing in the winter - is so old as to be unsalvageable. The bathrooms are full of broken porcelain, and he decides whoever took a sledgehammer to the walls must have done the same to the toilets and sinks, just because.

He almost weeps with joy when he realizes he can save the beautiful tile of the fireplace surround and the ornate built-in cabinets that bookend it.

But the kitchen… the kitchen is it's own special hell. It's spacious, and complete with a large pantry, but the rest of it? There are holes in everything - drawers, cabinets, _walls_ - from rodents eating their way in, and there's so much of their urine and feces in addition to the ever-present mold he feels like he needs a Level-A clean suit with it's own purified air supply just so he doesn't contract some lethal virus simply setting foot in it.

Like the rest of the house, he'll have to gut it; take it down to the studs and rebuild it from the ground up. On the one hand, that means he'll get to make it exactly how he wants it, but on the other hand… it's just so much work. Much more work than he anticipated putting into the house, and as he stares at it all, all he can think about is the cost. Even doing the work himself - something which he's utterly unqualified to do -, it will run into thousands of dollars, and though he's got some money saved, he knows it's not enough, certainly not after he replaces the roof if the estimates he got are any indication.

He feels sick. Not from illness or injury, but from the stress and worry of Being an Adult; of not knowing how he's going to meet his basic needs and survive, and it's terrifying. For the first time in his life he wants to be a child again, to go back to the days when that responsibility rested on someone else's shoulders, and he could live in blissful ignorance of what not having enough money means.

He stumbles over the trash to the back porch and puts his head between his knees, trying to will away the panic clawing up his throat, desperately thinking of ways he can stretch every penny in his savings, and praying that some bill doesn't pop up and wipe him out completely. He prays that he can still afford food between paychecks, and make his rent because it will be _months_ before he can live in this place.

And he's still sitting there, shaking and covered in sweat that isn't entirely from the hard, physical labor he's been putting in since sunrise when he gets another visitor. "You look like you could use a drink, boy," a gruff male voice says.

Peeta looks up to find an older man a few feet away, watching him, a bottle in one hand, and a goose cradled in the other. It gives a loud _honk_, but he jostles it a little and says, "be quiet, Effie," to shush it.

For a moment Peeta just sits there, staring, his sluggish brain trying to reconcile the weirdness of the scene.

"You're not one of those teetotalers, are you?" the man asks, disgust evident in his voice.

"No."

"Good. Can't stand those self-righteous bastards," he says, taking a long pull on the bottle. "So, you bought the old Cohen house, huh? Be nice having someone living in it regular again."

"Yeah, well, I may not be living in it anytime soon," Peeta snaps, his voice uncharacteristically hard. "Replacing the roof will wipe out my savings. I don't know how much it will cost to fix the pipes or put in new electrical wire, but unless I can get it done for the price of a box doughnuts, I can't afford it."

The older man looks at him appraising for a moment, and then says, "come with me," and turns on his heel, disappearing around the side of the house.

"Sorry, I didn't catch your name?" Peeta says when he catches up to him.

"Didn't offer it, but it's Haymitch. Haymitch Abernathy," he says without turning around.

"I'm Peeta."

"I know. The girl told."

"The girl? Katniss, you mean?" he puzzles.

Haymitch grunts in assent but keeps walking until they're standing in the middle of the street, and then he starts pointing to each of the houses in turn. "That's the Hawthorne's up on the corner. Mr. Hawthorne died about ten years ago, leukemia. His widow and four kids are still there though. They raise a few pigs and a cow every year, graze the animal on the empty lots."

"I'm next door. Got the girl and her sister and mother living with me. Prim raises goats for milk and cheese. I have chicken and geese for eggs and meat; built them coops and barns out of scrap wood and salvaged corrugated steel. Sweetheart turned those empty lots into a garden," he says, pointing the vacant plots that separate his home from Peeta's and stretch all the way to the next street over.

"We barter with the Hawthorne's for meat, with the Latier's for honey, with the Seeder's for fruit. When the summer storms come through we'll chop up the fallen trees that the city won't do anything about and burn them in the winter to save on heating costs because the first thing to go when you don't have money is the luxury of warmth and light. The next is food. We banded together because we had to, but money only gets you so far - not that any of us have much of it," he adds as an aside. "If you want to survive around here you've got to be smart and resourceful."

* * *

Every moment that Peeta isn't at work or working on his own house he's trawling through the articles on urban homesteading websites. He spends so much time on _Mother Earth News_ and _This Old House_ he's sure their banners is going to be burned into the screen of his laptop. He prints articles out and highlights them, studying home building harder than he ever did any of his school subjects.

The task in front of him is still daunting, but action does more to quell his panic than anything else, so he spends the few precious hours of daylight left after work taking a sledgehammer and crowbar to the interior walls of his house, removing the old sheetrock and insulation. He rips out the disgusting carpet, and two weeks later when the trash company comes to take the dumpsters away, he watches them leave feeling like he's actually accomplished something.

He can't help smiling when he sees Katniss crossing his yard, eyes wide and taking in all the changes. "Hey," he greets her, feeling that same flutter of nerves he did the last time. He doesn't know what it is about this girl that makes him feel like an inexperienced teenager all over again, but she does.

Her cheeks are pink and there are wispy pieces of hair falling out of her braid framing her face when she peeks through the door he's leaning against. She smells like something herbally and green - juniper, maybe -, smoke, and girl sweat. "I don't think I've ever seen the inside of this place," she says wonderingly.

Peeta laughs lightly. "I'm pretty sure I had to shovel out a couple tonnes of garbage. You want the grand tour?" he offers.

"Sure."

He leads her through the house, proud but nervous. He spends a lot of time explaining to her what it will be despite what it is right now, and only belated realizing - when he's in full flow about a wanting a marble topped island in the kitchen - just how much work he still has to do. "Sorry," he says, abashed. "I'm probably boring you."

"No, you're not," she says, cheeks flushing like she got caught enjoying something she shouldn't have.

They both stand there for a silent, awkward minute. Him looking at her and looking away when he gets caught and her doing the same. Finally, she breaks the silence.

"So, Haymitch likes you. He wanted me to invite you to dinner tonight. So you can meet the rest of the neighbors," she hastily adds. "I shot a couple of wild turkey's and we're all getting together, so -," she cuts off abruptly, biting her lip and refusing to meet his eye again.

"That sounds good, great actually. I'm starving," he says with more enthusiasm than he intends, but he _is_ hungry.

He's careful to tuck the few tools he has into the hall closet and gives the place one last sweeping glance before they leave. "Do you ever buy groceries at the grocery story?" he asks as they walk out of the house. He always has the urge to close the front door, and then he remembers that he still doesn't have one.

"Sometimes. There's always stuff we need, salt and things we can't grow. But we need other things too, like clothes," she says as they slowly walk up the street. "This way at least, if Prim needs school supplies or a new pair of shoes, we can afford it and still eat at the same time."

"Couldn't you apply for food stamps?" he asks, unthinking. He knows almost half the people in Detroit live in poverty, but that's what assistance programs are for, or at least that's what he's been taught; that when you're hungry the government will be there to feed you, one way or another.

Katniss laughs mirthlessly. "I could. Old Mrs. Seeder gets them to help feed the five grandchildren she's been raising since their parents died. But it's not enough. Have you ever tried to feed yourself on a hundred and thirty dollars a month? Because that's what they give you. Enough to keep you alive. Barely."

Peeta stares down at his feet as they walk, shamed and chastised. And angry too because with all the riches in this country, no one should go hungry. Katniss doesn't say anything either until they get to her house when she offers to let him use the downstairs bathroom to clean up in, and he realizes how dirty he actually is.

The neighbors don't seem to mind at all either way. Roseline, Katniss' mother, and Hazelle Hawthorne press a heaping plate of food into his hands; Chaff slaps him on the back with his one remaining hand before offering him a swig of homebrewed hard cider; Rue and Mrs. Seeder's other grandchildren flock around him regardless, just the same as Posy, the youngest Hawthorne does.

The only person who doesn't seem to want him there is Gale, the oldest Hawthorne, who spends just as much time glaring at him as he does watching Katniss. He can tell there's a history there just from the looks they give each other, but he decides maybe it's not so far in the past when he sees Gale leading her to a secluded part of the yard to talk where they won't overheard.

Peeta gets drawn into conversation with Beetee and Chaff, who along with Haymitch he spends most of his time talking to, plotting and planning and getting their thoughts on all the things he wants to do to his house as time and money allow. The one thing they're all adamant about is that he not put anything in it that he doesn't want stolen - like pipes - until he's living there.

The conversation stops abruptly when a sharp cracking sound split the air. At first Peeta doesn't understand what the big deal is, it's just a backfiring car, until he realizes it's not that at all. It's gunshots. And everyone holds their breath. Waiting for more, waiting for screaming, waiting for the sound of sirens that never come. The silence that follows is worse than the noise because it's lets you think about how a life might have just ended, and it makes the constant threat of violence that lurks around the city frighteningly, sickeningly real.

Dinner breaks up not long after, no one feeling very lively anymore. He wants to say goodbye to Katniss though, and he finds her, leaning against the picket fence that separates the backyard from the barnyard where the geese and chickens and goats live.

"Thanks for inviting me to dinner," he says quietly, mimicking her position.

"I didn't. Haymitch did," she points out.

"Still."

"You're welcome, then," she says with a hint of a smile.

"I should get going," he says, though he makes no move to leave.

"Okay."

He forces his feet to move, but before he gets very far her voice stops him. "Do you really want that marble counter top?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says, bewildered.

"I need help getting the garden ready for planting this year. It will only take a day with the both of us. So, if you want, I could trade you. Your help for a day - a weekend at most -, for some marble counters for your kitchen."

Peeta would do it for free, but he doesn't say that. Instead he says, "I'd like that."


End file.
